


fertile ground for the planting of seed

by suitablyskippy



Category: Gintama
Genre: Gen, Motherhood, Pastiche, Questionable Maternal Instincts, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-17
Updated: 2016-10-17
Packaged: 2018-08-22 23:49:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8305853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitablyskippy/pseuds/suitablyskippy
Summary: All I cared about in the world rested there in my arms, heavy and sleepy and silver-permed, her eyes an unforgettable shade of rusty red-brown: my daughter. The proof of my love. The proof of my fully, completely, totally sexually active love.(In the maternity ward of Edo Hospital, Sacchan discovers motherhood, the deep-seated urge to nourish and nurture, and Jodi Picoult's prose style.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt 'Jodi Picoult Gintama AU', except thanks to the wonderful fact that nothing in Gintama ever needs to be AU, this is totally canon compliant; also written with much love for Jodi and all her relentlessly motherhood-fixated protagonists. It's a pastiche, but it's a loving one!

Do you remember the first time you saw the palms of your daughter’s hands?

I do. Her fingers were unimaginably small, furled into a fist like the petals of a flower furled before the sunrise. Stretching, grasping, trying her hardest to reach for something she didn’t know and couldn’t understand. To reach for love. To reach for me, her mother… but doesn’t ‘love’ mean the same thing as ‘mother’? To be a mother is to love. A mother is a being of pure love. That’s what I understood, for the first time in my life, when I saw my daughter’s tiny fingers unfurl to show her palms.

As I sat there in my hospital bed, warmed by the honeyed light slanting perfectly through the window, I held my child in my arms and I realised that I had already changed more than I’d ever have believed I was capable of changing. A driven, ambitious workaholic – that’s how my colleagues would have described me. Ruthless in the pursuit of my professional goals. A murderer, technically. A hired killer.

But I looked at my daughter and I knew, somewhere so deep inside me that words could never touch the feeling, that that wasn’t who I was anymore. That was someone I could never be again. I couldn’t look at her tiny, stubbornly grasping fingers without giving her my own finger to hold – so much larger than her own, and yet still shapely and attractive; I was a young mother, in the prime of my life, fertile ground for the planting of much, much more seed to come.

Love had brought my daughter into this world, and that same love had changed me. The way her fingers curled and clutched reminded me of nothing so much of the pale, delicate curls of her father’s hair. The grasp of a newborn’s fingers, the perm of a one-time samurai’s silver locks: both of these stirred a love inside me so deep it was primal. A love so deep I knew I would do anything for it. A love so strong it almost scared me.

 _So this is what people mean by the phrase ‘mama bear’_ , I thought to myself, and smiled as I stroked my daughter’s perfect silvery curls back from her brow. 

There was a knock at the door, and the red-haired midwife came in. Once upon a time I would have catalogued her appearance in that first split-second – much shorter than me, her hair an unappealing orangey red, pinned up in two ‘exotic’-looking ornaments – but now I was sated with love, and I couldn’t remember why I would ever even have cared about the appearance of this significantly less attractive woman with her thankless, ill-paid job and probably miserable love life. It was none of my business if she was capable of conceiving, or if when she lay alone in her empty, too-large bed at night she dreamed of conceiving, or if she’d ever once conceived but lost the child under tragic circumstances she still mourned bitterly to this day; it was none of my business, and I had no interest in that information. All I cared about in the world rested there in my arms, heavy and sleepy and silver-permed, her eyes an unforgettable shade of rusty red-brown: my daughter. The proof of my love. The proof of my fully, completely, totally sexually active love.

“Are you two bonding?” asked the midwife. “Although I’ve never had a child—” _I knew it_ , I thought; that was probably why she worked as a midwife, so that despite her own bitterly regretted barrenness she could still live through the joy of new motherhood every day of her life, “—they say that right after the birth is the most important time for a mother to bond with her child, uh-huh.”

I smiled. “Oh, yes. We’re really bonding.”  
_  
Bonding_ : an ironic choice of words. Atoms can bond. Metal, heated to liquidity, can bond with other metals. Friends can bond. A mother can bond with her daughter. And I had bonded with my lover, the father of my child, every night for months; we had created our daughter while bonding. It probably wasn’t the type of bonding that this simple, unsophisticated midwife was thinking of, though. No, when my lover and I bonded, it involved equipment as much as it involved love. Ropes as much as romance. Small sharp knives as much as the pleasure of each other’s company.

“I’m thinking of naming her Ginko,” I added. “After her father. My lover.” My daughter yawned as I said it, showing off her healthy pink gums for both of us to see, and I felt another stab of love as cruel as the stab of kitchen scissors when my lover – a reckless, passionate man – had found me tucked away in his kitchen cabinets, where I liked to hide and await his love. Like daughter, like father: Ginko yawned, and sometimes her father would yawn as well. The similarities overwhelmed me. 

“Ginko? I knew a man who went by Ginko once,” mused the midwife. “Ginko, Gin-chan, Gin-san, Gintoki. He had as many names as he had jobs, and he worked a new job every day. Well, not every day; he was too lazy to schedule his timetable that well, uh-huh. But don’t we all have a flaw? That one flaw as much a part of ourselves as our own hearts. A flaw we can never change, no matter how hard we try, and no matter how much pain it causes us. For me, it’s greed. I’ve always been greedy. When I was young, I was greedy for rice. Burgers. Pickled seaweed. Then I grew older, and I began to feel greedy for other things. More rice. Tempura prawns. Dango, but only green tea flavour. And I knew I was a woman at last when I began to feel greedy for other things stranger still. Even more rice. Chocolate-dipped raisins. Babies. Not to eat, just to nourish inside me for nine months and then bring into the world to love as fiercely as a lioness loves her cubs. Greed, that’s my flaw. I’ve always known it. And laziness, that’s Gin-chan’s. He’s an odd-jobs man. And doesn’t that say it all?”

It did. _Odd-jobs man_ : a man who did odd jobs. ‘Odd’ in the sense of unusual, and ‘odd’ in the sense of sporadic. But if you were to guess what kind of sex an ‘odd-jobs man’ might have, and you guessed ‘unusual and sporadic’, you’d be only half right. The sex was unusual, yes. Depraved, yes. Sensual, hungry, bizarre – yes, yes, yes; but it was _incessant_. He was insatiable, my odd-jobs man.

My daughter was mouthing damply, hopefully, against the side of my breast. I knew what she wanted, but I turned her face firmly away; she was a hungry newborn, but that gave her no right to infringe on her father’s territory. “Do you know,” I said to the midwife, “I think it might be the same man. Your odd-jobs man and mine. Gin-san and Gin-chan. It’s a small world, isn’t it? As small as a newborn’s tiny fingernail, or your breasts. No offence.”

The red-haired midwife smiled at me. Her smile was too wide to be called attractive, but I was sure that somewhere out there was a man who would love her for who she was, flat chest and ‘exotic’ hair ornaments and noticeable foreign accent and all. “Let’s take your blood pressure, shall we?” she suggested, and yanked a length of rubbery tubing taut with a _snap_ as she advanced on me.

The second midwife didn’t knock. He was a male midwife, which set me on edge at once; and he also wore glasses, which made the feeling worse. Perhaps it was irrational, but I’d always felt men who wore glasses were somehow weaker than those who didn’t. For me, on some level, strong eyesight signalled potent virility. He was screaming, too, which made me curl around my daughter as protectively as a hedgehog curls around its soft underbelly. And my daughter _was_ my soft underbelly, now; she was the most vulnerable part of me, and I would cover myself in spikes if that was what it took to protect her from the world.

“That’s not her baby!” the male midwife was screaming. “She’s not even a patient! She’s not pregnant, she was _never_ pregnant, she climbed up the fire escape and sneaked in and stole a baby, that’s _not her baby_ —”

He was red in the face with exertion, though I was willing to bet he’d never known a trial as gruelling as the one I had so recently endured: that of giving birth. I held my daughter closer and knew that I would kill for her. 

“She’s got her medical record, though,” objected the red-haired midwife. She lifted my patient’s chart from the foot of my bed. “Tanaka Yui, thirty-three years old, delivered a healthy baby girl at oh-eight-twelve on—”

“That’s not her chart! Kagura-chan, open your eyes!” The male midwife crossed the room in two strides, and made a sharp, violent gesture near my head. “That’s just Sacchan-san in a blonde wig!”

I felt a sudden coolness around my scalp, and an equally sudden coolness around my heart. My daughter looked up at me and began to cry.

Not content with ruining my daughter’s rest, the male midwife continued shrilly on. “And that baby’s in a wig too, isn’t she? Look how lopsided her hair is. Newborns never have that much hair anyway, and that baby’s already got a silver-permed mullet. Kagura-chan, we need to call security.”

I could tell the red-haired midwife was already looking at me in a different light. Something about the set of her shoulders, the angle of her brows, the way her hands had curled into fists so much less gentle than my daughter’s.

“And aside from anything else, Sacchan-san running around the hospital stealing babies is going to compromise _us_ being undercover here, isn’t it? And how are we going to have enough money for ice cream this weekend if we get kicked off this job halfway through? Kagura-chan?” 

The red-haired midwife tossed aside her blood-pressure equipment and began rolling up her sleeves. She couldn’t take her eyes off my face, and in my heart I knew it was because she envied the healthy, radiant glow that motherhood and love had given me. “The only action Gin-chan’s seen in the last nine months is watching Sadaharu hump the vacuum cleaner,” she announced, “I _knew_ he hadn’t had a baby, uh-huh. Sacchan, if you don’t give me that baby then I’m gonna—”

“Take her!” I screamed. I scrambled from my bed, kicking back the thin hospital sheets to reveal my body beneath them, fully dressed in ninja purples. My daughter was still cradled in my arms, and tears blurred my vision as I shoved her out before me. “ _Take her_! Take my child and raise her to know that she was loved! Take her, and tell her how her mother would have died for her! Killed for her! _Take her_!”

“What—” began the red-haired midwife, but I shoved my daughter into her arms and whirled away, towards the window and the honeyed sunlight that streamed in through it. With one kick, the latch was broken; with another kick, the window swung up and open. I hurled myself forwards and out into the skies; I fell, fell, fell – but then I stopped falling. My kunai dug into the old brickwork of the hospital’s face; steel scraped on stone, and held.

Above, the sun shone. Below, the traffic roared. Above, the two midwives leaned out of the window yelling down at me. Below, I shook another kunai from my leggings and kicked it into place, testing my weight against it: it held.

I was safe. I was suspended. It was curious how I had always felt safest when suspended, whether by spur-of-the-moment hand- and footholds nine stories up from a busy city street far below, or whether by a complex bondage apparatus designed to maximise the masochistic pleasure of a committed submissive. 

Slowly, steadily, I wrenched the first kunai from the wall and drove it in again, lower. And again, and again: I began to climb down. Motherhood had changed me. My daughter had only been with me for a few fleeting, precious minutes, but in that time I had learned more of love than I had ever known there was to learn. I knew now what it was to love another human being so completely that they were a part of you; I knew what it was to nurture them inside myself; I knew what it was to force them from the most private and sexual of my bodily orifices.

I descended from the hospital as I had once descended from innocence. Soon I would ascend again – onto Gintoki’s roof – as I had once ascended into experience. Sexual experience. And then I would descend again, through Gintoki’s bedroom window, as together we had once descended into depravity. And then together, once more, we would descend into depravity yet again.

For me, that’s simply what it means to be a mother.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here on tumblr](http://suitablyskippy.tumblr.com/post/148798974074/jodi-picoult-gintama-au) a couple of months ago!


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